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Uregnt please!

My husband teaches 16-18 year olds in an FE college. He has to deliver key skills/functional (whatever you want to call them) in English and maths. He gets a lot of children who were not academically strong an dwho have gone through the whole sustem with very poor literacy and numeracy skills. He's currently studying for a degree in education and has to write a discursive essay about this particular topic (literacy/numeracy/key skills). He wants to know the reasons for the poor literacy and numeracy results we see in primary age children and which filtrate through their academic life. is the national curriculum to blame? Has it had an impact on the delivery/methods/ways of teaching maths and English? Is it the way the curriculum constantly changes? Is it due to poor parental input? He would like to hear about as many views as possible to try and get a clearer image of what's going on.
Thank you for your help.

My husband teaches 16-18 year olds in an FE college. He has to deliver key skills/functional (whatever you want to call them) in English and maths. He gets a lot of children who were not academically strong an dwho have gone through the whole sustem with very poor literacy and numeracy skills. He's currently studying for a degree in education and has to write a discursive essay about this particular topic (literacy/numeracy/key skills). He wants to know the reasons for the poor literacy and numeracy results we see in primary age children and which filtrate through their academic life. is the national curriculum to blame? Has it had an impact on the delivery/methods/ways of teaching maths and English? Is it the way the curriculum constantly changes? Is it due to poor parental input? He would like to hear about as many views as possible to try and get a clearer image of what's going on.
Thank you for your help.

Pay a visit to the UK Reading Reform Foundation at www.rrf.org.uk .
There has been a battle for many, many years as to how we teach basic skills and it still rages.
I provide teacher-training in reading and spelling instruction and have written basic literacy programmes.
Only yesterday I asked at a training event whether anyone at all had any training, ever, in teaching spelling and in marking spelling.
Not a single one of us.
Is it any wonder, then, that some students are sadly lacking in basic skills? Many teachers and assistants simply don't know how best to teach the basics.

Consider that national literacy assesment at the age of seven is focused on genre writing, written comprehension and a conversation about some text after reading it.
In other words, running before walking and skipping over the basics. And that's just in the infants.
Too much higher order stuff too soon.

some kids start school at a time before they are ready to learn, thus they do not progress, fail to progress in some schools and you get 'labelled.' The label stays with you and your self esteem plummets. low self esteem, a label and you are destined not to achieve. And yes they are the victims of the system that has a curriculum and assessment policies that won't wait for them.

Thank you for your reply. We will go and check the website you recommended. You have given us something to discuss and build upon. I totally agree with your second post. It is often my feeling that we are asking children to do so much at such a young age.
Thank you.

Hi debbiehep,
I'm interested in your views on marking spelling. I am always tempted to, and often do, underline incorrectly spelt words and write in the correct spelling. My view is that unless you point out to a child that they have spelled a word wrong then they may never realise and merrily continue to spell it incorrectly. However, I also understand the argument that to have a piece of work covered in spelling corrections can be demoralising for a child.
I received no actual training in relation to marking spellings, apart from it being alluded to in the training on assessment, where the advice was as above: don't correct spellings if it is not the learning intention. I picked up techniques for marking spellings from teachers at my placemements. These included: underlining words and putting the correct spelling in the margin; asking the child to copy out the word correctly, three times; underlining the word and asking the child to look up the correct spelling in a dictionary; underlining words and asking the child to record in their spelling book to learn for a test the next week.
Really interested in your views and ideas.
Many thanks.
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P.S. Before anyone comments on the spelling of my user name, I know it should be you're but I wanted it to be you R joking (as in toys R us) but somehow it didn't quite work!!!

You are right that teachers are trained to mark according to the main learning intention - and I suggest that this is very neglectful of spelling.
My approach is to mark for spelling as a constant in addition to the main learning intention.
In fact, I would even dispute the notion only of the main learning intention because the older the pupils that we teach, the more layered and multiple are underlying learning intentions - the 'constants' if you like.
I understand entirely on the need to simplify our teaching and to have a focus learning intention.
If we wrote down all our teaching/learning intentions for our lessons, they would be many and they would be varied.
This is something that never seems to be discussed, acknowledged, perhaps not even understood well enough by 'experts' who give guidance to teachers.
This is also contributory to me being critical of observations and inspection procedures where teachers, very rarely I suspect, get a proper chance to discuss the nature of their practice and classroom management - how they juggle the zillions of bits of knowledge and skills' stuff going on in the classroom.
Regarding spelling, let's start at a likely possibility - that if an employer was selecting candidates for interview and two applications were basically of equal calibre - but one reflected some poor spelling and grammar - what would happen to the application form? In the bin?
In other words, in many instances spelling can be a life-chance thing. It can certainly be a self-esteem thing. It is very important and yet there is no training to teach spelling as far as I am aware and we are trained not to mark for spelling other than for spelling tests per se.
All very illogical and all very unaccountable for the teaching and teacher-training profession.
I totally agree with your observation that if we don't draw attention to wrong spellings, how are students even to know that they have spelled something incorrectly. They certainly won't get the message that it matters whether they spell words incorrectly if we ignore their wrong spellings. Even our word processing programmes underline incorrect spellings in red and query the grammar with green underlining.
If all the teachers in all our primary schools started to routinely mark for spelling - along the lines you describe for example, this would make a difference I have no doubt. It's the bread and butter stuff of schools and of writing.
Also, we need to get away from the idea that phonics teaching is for infants alone. In my training events, I demonstrate how phonics for both reading and spelling is just as much 'adult-stuff' for reading new, longer, and more complex words. And yet many teachers of older students automatically tell them spellings in letter names rather than model what they, the teacher, do as a proficient adult speller to spell more challenging words (that is, usually chunk the spoken word up into syllable chunks).
Key Stage Two teachers really do need to know about synthetic phonics teaching for decoding and encoding, and whole schools need to adopt an alphabetic code and word banks that they are accountable for teaching and ensure they have whole school programmes for teaching spelling thoroughly and effectively.

Debbie,
Thank you very much for your reply. Hear, hear! Fully agree with your views - glad to know I'm not alone. I think it goes back to how I learnt - I'm sure my spelling mistakes were always corrected!
Thanks again.